American middle and high school teachers face challenges recognizable to educators of just about any era: overcrowded classrooms, disruptive students, plagiarism and other cheating, and parents who are more obstacle than partner.
But veteran teachers tell me they’ve seen a new challenge over the past few years: widespread disengagement. Heads on desks. Rampant apathy. Zoned-out students with low energy and even lower interest in learning. (I have to wonder: If living, breathing teachers struggle to motivate students, what can we expect from humanoid robots, promoted by First Lady Melania Trump this week as the future of American education?)
If we want something to blame for this disengagement, there are options aplenty. Many students are still dealing with learning loss and other challenges from pandemic-era school closures—and perhaps always will be. Compared with endless short-form videos and other techno-dopamine hits, even the most talented teacher at the whiteboard will seem dull. Glitchy learning platforms have moved classwork and homework online, frustrating students and teachers alike. Novel ways of teaching have students more focused on tests than mastery. Anxiety is up. Social connection is down. All around, it’s bleak.
But on top of all this is an increasingly inescapable new cultural message: Artificial intelligence will soon do everything you do, and it’ll do it faster and better than you ever could. That message is difficult enough to challenge if you’re an adult. Imagine hearing it when you’re 15 and bored in class, fully aware that you can answer any question your teacher asks in milliseconds using Google Gemini on your school-district-issued Chromebook. Why not outsource your thinking to a machine? It’s easy, frictionless, and—it seems—inevitable in this brave new world.
And also: Your classmates are doing it already. School counselors tell kids to take school seriously because good grades produce a bright future. But 75 to 80 percent of American high school students admit to cheating, and in many schools, funding systems reward keeping kids in seats over ensuring they’ve learned the content—so kids get passed along even if they fail. One Connecticut student graduated high school—with honors!—and is now suing her school district for negligence because she never learned to read.
Students notice all this and understandably wonder why they should bother to be diligent and honest. Why trudge along, memorizing names and dates and vocab words, just to compete against AI cheating? Why aspire to a particular vocation if you’ve been told it’ll soon be done more efficiently and affordably by a computer named Claude or a humanoid named Plato? Just wait for the robots to come and give you a universal basic income. And what’s the point of education, anyway, in the face of an AI takeover? Why try if nothing matters?
American teenagers are getting a crash course in nihilism, and their apathy is a rational response to a demoralizing situation.
No one knows better than educators how desperately young people need hopeful, realistic answers to these questions. The teachers I’ve interviewed describe grappling with these queries in their classrooms on a routine basis.
One teacher said she tells her middle school science students that AI is only ever as smart as its user: You must be a clear thinker to prompt it effectively. You must be able to recognize reasonable answers from illogical and unhelpful ones to avoid being deceived.
Another educator, a middle school reading and writing teacher, told me she reassures her students that she’d rather read their work—and will grade it more generously, even if it has errors—than the impersonal, inauthentic AI substitutes some students pass off as their own. The point of learning to write, she tries to communicate, is to learn how to think for yourself. “We don’t assign essays because there’s a national shortage of 9th grade interpretations of Macbeth,” in the words of writer Caitlin Flanagan. “We do it because the process of writing that paper teaches the student a lot of skills.”
Athletic and musical metaphors tend to resonate with some students, multiple teachers told me. Athletes know they cannot excel at their sports if they haven’t put in hours of training. Musicians will never be able to play beautiful music if they haven’t first practiced. These comparisons make sense for some students, who come to understand that they’ll lose out in the long term when they take the path of least mental resistance.
But classroom education today rarely rewards disciplined students the way athletic and musical endeavors do. Cheat subtly enough, and you can still get good grades and a path to future success. Even when students know it isn’t in their own best interest to outsource their thinking to AI, they rightfully recognize that their immediate challenges—acceptance at competitive universities, desirable internships, and jobs—don’t depend on long-term intellectual development. They depend on grades and test scores now.
And so, even when schools try to ban or limit AI use, students use it anyway. They know our educational system largely rewards those who do. If you’re skeptical, ask an ambitious high schooler at a public or tech-friendly private school if any classmates with better GPAs regularly cheat. I guarantee that some do—and that it’s an open secret among the students.
The tech involved is novel, of course, but we shouldn’t find any of this surprising. Our culture is geared for optimization and utility, profit and instant gratification. It’s failing to offer a compelling answer to these big questions. If we want students to value education in the age of AI, we must give them more meaningful metrics and better questions to ask. But what does that entail?
I took this question to Jeffrey Bilbro, a CT contributor who’s an English professor at Grove City College and author of a forthcoming book on AI, Creaturely Intelligence: Living as Creatures in a World Made for Machines. He’s eager to help his students want to pursue a life of intellectual and spiritual growth even in the midst of such uncertain and transformative technological shifts.
The way forward starts not with fighting against the inevitabilities of tech, Bilbro told me, but with a choice. It’s a question, first articulated by Wendell Berry in his essay Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, that each of us must answer: Will we be “people who wish to live as creatures” or “people who wish to live as machines”?
“As information becomes easier than ever to access, it’s more important than ever to have intellectual virtues—like humility, attention, and patience—and numerical and verbal literacy to make sense of abundant information,” said Bilbro. It’s difficult to form these virtues “in this noisy environment,” he continued, but that makes them all the more necessary and likely evermore rare. We must help our youth understand that the point of education is the pursuit of wisdom.
I recognize how lofty that sounds, and I don’t pretend to know how to reform an entire country’s worth of educational institutions to better meet this moment. But I can share what my husband and I are telling our own children, as often and in as many ways as we can: Education is about your formation, not merely about gathering information.
You read To Kill a Mockingbird not merely to check it off an assigned reading list but to think about what it means to be morally courageous when there’s great social pressure to conform.
You study World War II not just to memorize facts and dates but to consider what virtues you must cultivate to be rightly prepared if history repeats itself.
You learn mathematics not just to get an A on a test but to think with clarity and order in a chaotic world.
You build a model of the human brain out of clay not because it will be more scientifically accurate than one you could buy on Amazon but because exercising human creativity, however clumsily, builds a more beautiful world.
These reasons are true for everyone, but they are particularly and firmly rooted in the rich history and tradition of our Christian faith. Scripture frames our human frailty and limitations not as a problem to be overcome (2 Cor. 12:9) but as a means through which we can encounter God’s mercy, tenderness, presence, and love.
The point of education in the face of AI takeover is that it still shapes the kind of people we will be. That is why no program or robot, however “humanoid,” can be an acceptable substitute for human teachers—the very idea is dangerously inhumane and aimed directly at the most vulnerable and impressionable members of our society. And this truth about formation is what we must teach our children in our homes and in our classrooms, even in public schools where reasoning may not be tied to biblical chapter and verse.
God calls us to be people who love him with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind and who love our neighbors as ourselves (Matt. 22:37–39). This includes growth and development for the good of ourselves and the world around us, for “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10). In Christ, we have distinctly human callings that computers can never fulfill, and understanding education as formation frees us to answer those calls instead of submitting to the impossible tyranny of competing with machines. They will always be smarter, but they cannot be wise.
AI is impressive already and only getting better. For the rest of our lives, it will always be better than us at retrieving facts and spitting out endless words. But it will never be better at being human. A computer program can never love truth, grieve injustice, be courageous, or stare up in wide-eyed wonder at the Milky Way on a dark West Texas night, humbled by the immense mystery of it all.
These are achievements of a soul, not a processor. This is the point of an education.
Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com
